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News ID: 51267
Publish Date : 17 March 2018 - 21:37

‘Over 150,000 People in Syria's Afrin Displaced’

BEIRUT (Dispatches) – More than 150,000 people have been displaced in the last few days from Syria’s Afrin town, a senior Kurdish official and a monitoring group said on Saturday.
Hevi Mustafa, a top member of the civil authority governing the Afrin region, said people were fleeing the main town to other Kurdish-held parts of the region and to government territory.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, said Turkish warplanes and artillery struck the town overnight, and at least 150,000 had fled since Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Syrian Kurdish forces and a so-called monitoring group say the Turkish military’s shelling and airstrikes against a hospital and purported positions of the People's Protection Units (YPG) militants in Syria’s northwestern town of Afrin have claimed the lives of over three dozen civilians.
According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Turkish airstrike hit "directly" the main hospital in Afrin on Friday night, killing 16 civilians, "including two pregnant women."
The Kurdish Red Crescent medical service, which supports the hospital, confirmed to AFP the hospital was hit but did not give a toll.
"There was bombing on the city during the day that got close to the hospital, but this evening it was directly hit," said Serwan Bery, co-chair of the Kurdish Red Crescent and based in the northeastern Syria town of Qamishli.
"It was the only functioning hospital in Afrin," he added.
Earlier in the day, Redur Xelil, a senior official and spokesman of the US-backed YPG forces, said 20 people lost their lives and 30 others sustained injuries when Turkish forces shelled Afrin's Ashrafieh neighborhood.
The monitoring group, however, had put the death toll at 18.
The Britain-based monitor later released a video, showing four lifeless bodies lying on the streets of Afrin.
A senior UN official has warned against Turkey’s cross-border military operation in Syria’s Afrin, stating that the world body is receiving "deeply alarming” reports about civilian deaths and injuries due to airstrikes and ground-based strikes.
Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement on Friday that it is also getting reports that civilians are being prevented from leaving the area by Kurdish YPG militants.
Shamdasani said hundreds of thousands of civilians are at risk, including those recently displaced from other areas captured by Turkish troops and their allied militants from the so-called Free Syrian Army.
She said that the humanitarian situation is reportedly worsening, "with tremendous pressure on Afrin hospital - the only medical facility equipped for major operations.”